Christophe Pouplard was born on May 29, 1968 in Angers (France).
Son of the naturalist photographer Henri Pouplard, very young he becomes familiar with nature and begins to take care of the plants.
When only 13 years old, this young self-taught gardener starts the cultivation of bonsai, which allows him to enter a world that associates plants and Japanese ceramics for the composition of miniature landscapes …
For him, Nature is the artist, and he will always seek her collaboration in the creative artistic processes.
In 1995 he obtained a diploma of “environmental technician” at the agricultural school in Toulouse, and thus he was able to perfect his scientific knowledge.
In 1996, he decided to follow the path of his ancestor Léon Pouplard (1865-1954), renowned sculptor and naturalist ceramist in Malicorne (Sarthe), and sets up his first ceramic workshop in Toulouse, making pots for bonsai.
In 2002, he settled in Andalusia and for 3 years worked in the construction of a recyclable ecological house, made with wood, cane, lime and clay.
Between 2009 and 2012, he studied artistic ceramic at the Santelmo art school in Málaga.
Now he works in his workshop in Malaga.
Christophe Pouplard is also an actor and vegetal decorator for theater and cinema since 2000.
Property Villafavela
Villafavela is an ecological farm of 2.5 hectares, located 9 km north of Malaga.
It is designed in Permaculture and every year it becomes more sustainable, more active in the restoration of the ecosystem and the water cycle. Every year the recovery of the ecosystem is noticed and Nature becomes more generous.
The orchard lays on two terraces where fruit trees and vegetables coexist. It is a place of experimentation to cultivate plants without tillage of the soil, maintaining an upper layer intact and very rich in living microorganisms and microbes.
My work
My work talks about life, in the most open sense of the word. The life that is continuously shared and organized, mixing extremely fragile elements with stronger ones that are earth, water, air and fire.
My work is an ongoing process, a drop of water, a grain of sand, sometimes it is just an idea, lost in a perpetual transformation of the elements on a temporary scale that escapes me.
In my work, living beings collaborate. They complete the object, because it is made for them. They share space and time. It is a meeting between sculpture, a living being, and the living substrate that houses millions of micro organisms essential for the development of life.
It is an artistic symbiosis whose muse is Nature.
I want to always remember that there is no death, to take away that fear once and for all, to enjoy this wonderful journey we are doing together.
The organic
Organic molecules are immortal and universal particles whose association, according to some philosophers, produces living beings.
The concept of life and death inherent to each being then loses its legitimacy, because nothing is born or died: life is formed by the mixture of existing objects, and is resolved in them by separation. Birth is then nothing more than a combination, and death a separation.
As E.Perrier (Philos. Zool., Darwin, 1884) writes it, one can imagine organic molecules, indestructible, that associate temporarily to form vegetal or animal individuals, and that dissociate with the death of each individual, to later constitute other organisms.
For Theodor Gomperz (1832-1912), the concept of organicity goes beyond life because it speaks of immortality, of the perpetual mixing of particles to create the world around us. There is no longer life or death but permanence.
The earth, the water, the fire, the air, seem to be the simplest elements, but they are the most composed: they are loaded with “seeds”, they include the raw material necessary to compose all imaginable species.
The clay, kneaded with water, dried in the air and then cooked in the fire, is the perfect material to create organic forms.
These organic forms speak about immortality, within a spiritual and cosmic dimension.
Materials fused with fire
Clay is a natural material that holds the memory of time.
Wet, it preserves the traces of animals in nature and allows man to understand his habits.
Cooked, the clay becomes the witness of the existence of humanity. Just like the bones of prehistoric beings discovered in some archaeological sites, the clay tells us about our civilizations, their apogees and their declines …
The clay used by Christophe Pouplard is a simple clay that is cooked at about 1000 degrees Celsius. At this fusion temperature the material has lost all the water contained in its structure and becomes a hard and resistant material, capable of remaining intact for millions of years.
Within Nature, in front of the ephemeral of life, clay pretends to be eternal.